October 2011 – Page 8 – Public Intelligence Blog

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Review: A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation – And How to Save it

6 Star Top 10%, Atlases & State of the World, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Economics, History, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

cover crisis of civilization — Amazon Page

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond 5 Stars – Superb Individual Effort, October 25, 2011

In its own way this book is every bit as good as such classics as The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) or The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters (New in Paper) and I am also reminded of Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization, all books I have reviewed here at Amazon, mirrored (often with material added) at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.

I was tempted to keep the book at five stars because the author tip-toes around the core issue of our day, institutionalized corruption. While he opens by saying he is striving to address the “linkage between political violence and social crisis in the context of imperial social systems,” the word imperial is as close as he gets to calling out the global criminals that used to be called the elite, and their equally complicit enablers, the political class. Which reminds me of another important book, The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back as well as the more recent Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History.

Continue reading “Review: A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation – And How to Save it”

2011/10/25

John Steiner: 10 Years Late, NYT “Sees” Democracy Now!

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, IO Impotency, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth

A Grass-Roots Newscast Gives a Voice to Struggles

Brian Stelter

New York Times, 23 October 2011

EXTRACT

Some fans as well as critics describe “Democracy Now!” as progressive, but Ms. Goodman rejects that label and prefers to call it a global newscast that has “people speaking for themselves.” She criticized networks in the United States that have brought on professional pundits, rather than actual protesters, to discuss the Occupy protests.

Last week, no United States television network covered the filing of a lawsuit in Canada by four men who said they had been tortured during the Bush administration and who are seeking Mr. Bush’s arrest and prosecution. But one of the men, Murat Kurnaz, a former prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, was interviewed at length by Ms. Goodman and her co-host, Juan Gonzalez.

Read full story.

Phi Beta Iota: Now that the rest of the world has seen that the US Courts are generally corrupt and will not entertain law suits against those that led the US to an elective war costing trillions and including crimes against humanity at multiple levels, we anticipate a flood of law suits against George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, among others. As committed as we are to Truth & Reconciliation (with presidential pardons when full truth has been offered to the public by the individual concerned) we fear that absent a restoration of integrity to the electoral process and to the US Government in the 2012 elections, we are in for a decade of revenge against specific individuals and specific banks now known to have betrayed the public trust.

2011/10/25

Venessa Miemis: Contact Conference Hot Wash-Up

11 Society, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO)

venessa black & white new — Venessa Miemis

What the Contact Conference Was Really About

I am very grateful to have been able to take part in organizing the Contact Conference, an event that pitched itself as a working festival of innovation, a social technologies exhibitor space, and a celebration of the potential of a network culture.

And it was definitely all those things, so mission accomplished there. The energy in the room was great, the recipients of the three $1oK Innovation Awards worthy, and the four projects conceived and launched at the event exciting. (more details on those things below in Douglas Rushkoff’s letter to participants)

But that’s really only a part of the story.

The bigger picture here is that if we start from the premise that “the system is broken” or “we’re at a critical turning point’ or that “we’re in a global transition,” or any such broad sweeping statements about the functionality of our social/economic/political/environmental/technological/scientific systems, and the majority of the world’s population is either deeply dissatisfied or at the least has an itching feeling that there is something that is just not right… then the only sane choice left is to act.

Read full post.

2011/10/25

Chuck Spinney: Screwing the Greeks – Deeply

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Below are two eye opening reports/analyses by two of the best counterpunchers in Alexander Cockburn's and Jeffrey St Clair's stable of bomb throwers. The subject is Greece: its political/economic crisis and the myths surrounding average Greeks being the cause of its crisis.

In the first, Destroying the Livelihoods of Thirteen Million People: The Myth of Greek Profligacy, my friend Marshall Auerback, argues that the masses of the Greek people (the bottom 80% of a highly unequal income distribution) are being set up as scapegoats to pay for a neo-liberal austerity plan that aimed producing income deflation (instead of a currency devaluation) to improve export competitiveness. Auerback explains why this is really a plan of collective punishment that is guaranteed to fail while shredding what is left of Greece's social contract.

In the second, Naxos Hangs On By Its Fingernails: How Greeks Were Driven Back to the Land, Patrick Cockburn presents the reader with a micro-case study of what is happening to average Greeks (i.e. part of the lower 80%) on the island of Naxos, the largest and my favorite island in the windy Cyclades.

Chuck Spinney
Barcelona

Destroying the Livelihoods of Thirteen Million People
The Myth of Greek Profligacy
by MARSHALL AUERBACK,
Counterpunch, OCTOBER 24, 2011

Naxos Hangs On By Its Fingernails
How Greeks Were Driven Back to the Land
by PATRICK COCKBURN
Counterpunch, OCTOBER 18, 2011

Phi Beta Iota: One reason why the Electoral Reform and BigBatUSA endeavors are so important NOW, is because if they succeed in the USA, where Internet connectivity, cognitive surplus, and Occupy awaking have converged, the model can be scaled globally very quickly. At root this is about secular corruption. Pope Benedict XVI had a chance to use Assisi creatively but chose the low road.

2011/10/25

Jon Lebkowsky: Steve Jobs on Convergent Multi-Media

Autonomous Internet, Blog Wisdom

Apple’s convergent television: “I finally cracked it!”

We’ve been hearing for two decades now about television/computer/Internet convergence. Televisions sets today are advanced digital products, and we connect computers and specialized set-top boxes to ‘em, but they’re still primarily display devices.

In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes that Jobs ““very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant.”

Jobs told Isaacson that “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”

More on the Jobs/Apple vision of convergence here.

I’m imagining a media device that, like the Internet, swallows all other forms: television set, movie theatre, stereo, juke box, etc. But it would also be interactive, a window on the rest of the world. This isn’t exactly cutting edge – those who think about such things expected it before now.

Phi Beta Iota: Our own collective epiphany (translation for Democrats: “aha”) came in connection with the Contact endeavors of Doug Rushkoff, where we realized that connectivity comes first, and that public intelligence will evolve from that, not the other way around. HOWEVER, apart from Range Networks, we see no one seriously pursuing the OpenBTS “dumb” cell phone for free or $2 a month maximum (subsidized in the Third World), nor have we been successful at breaking through to the Vatican (read letter) or Sir Richard Branson (read one-pager), both of whom could have come together in Assisi to converge connectivity with the eradication of secular corruption.

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Robert Steele: Electoral Reform Road Trip – Pass It On! And Imagine Every Voter Doing $10 a Year Subscription for Democracy…

Uncategorized

steele smiling final — Robert David STEELE Vivas

After four years constructive unemployment, largely due to the illegal and abusive practices of DIA and DOHA that are being taken to court–I feel called to focus on Electoral Reform.

Here is the short URL for a campaign to raise $10,000 to take Electoral Reform hand-outs and stimulate electoral reform dialog across America, visiting each of the Occupy sites and where desired, stopping to help organize new Occupy sites.

http://tinyurl.com/ER-RoadTrip

The calculated cost per state is $200 for gas and oil and very occasional repairs, using a 1964 MGB for visibility and because it is my remaining car and daily driver.

I think we can do this. My objective is to achieve a Statement of Demand from across the Occupy movement, with a 15 February 2012 deadline for passage of the Electoral Reform Act of 2012, in time to assure open ballot access and other Phase I reforms for November 2012.

In passing I will try to inspire a BigBatUSA, where every eligible voter contributes $10 a year to protect the Electoral Reform Act, elect non-partisan honest citizens, and move toward a Constitutional Amendment that takes electoral corruption out of the realm of possibility into the future. Basic Math: 100 million x $10 = $1B a year. 200 million x $10 = $2B a year. 300 million x $10 a year = $3B a year. Not extrapolate that out to the rest of the world paying $1 a year for Panarchy with Autonomous Internet, OpenBTS connecting the five billion poor, and it is GAME OVER on predatory capitalism, virtual colonialism, and unilateral militarism.

In passing, where there is an interest, I will discuss my concept of demanding a Coalition Cabinet and a balanced budget as preconditions for candidates desiring to be elected President–anyone who cannot choose a Coalition Cabinet and come up with a semblance of a balanced budget at least 60 days prior to Election Day is simply not qualified to be President–at the same time that any average American willing to do this is qualified–better qualified even–by virtue of integrity combined with collective intelligence.

Here is are some short URLs that I hope all of you — good people trapped in corrupt system — will pass on and or take independent action on.

The short URL for this introductory posting is:

http://tinyurl.com/PBI-Road-Trip

http://tinyurl.com/ER-DIY

2011/10/25